Filming at the weekend.

? I hear you ask. Well, you know when you get drunk and watch a cool/crap kung fu movie with mates and you go ‘yeah we should make a fung fu movie’ ‘yeah’ and all that? Well that’s what I was doing many months ago. Last month a script appeared in my inbox - I’d been cast as the martial arts Guru and had quite a few lines and a ‘mega-action fight sequence’. I made a few suggestions on the script and now we’re filming! We had the sequence all choreographed (about 6 hours’ choreography -> about 12 secs fighting, so the fight sequences are a little less mega-action) and most of the filming went OK. We are very limited in battery life so the sun suddenly goes down half way through the fight, but hey, it’ll help hide the fact the ancient Chinese warriors are wearing bathrobes I guess…

One part of the sequence involved one of the warriors being thrown to the floor. When he gets up, he looks around and we get a tight close-up of his face saying “where is that fat fsck?” The EFFECT was to be that my face appears, as you see his feet disappear behind me. The way we thought we’d do this is: crash mat behind, I kneel, he gets on my shoulders, tight shot on face, I stand up.

There was a shortage of crash mats in the particular bit of wood that we were filming in.

So Linden (the mighty warrior) insisted that I could throw him and he’d be fine. Everybody else insisted he wouldn’t, and I insisted that I didn’t want to be involved in anything that ended in spinal injury. Eventually, we came up with the game plan: I would lift him, then he would slowly flop backwards and put his hands on the floor, then ease himself over. With luck it would be the right effect. We did a dry run and it was looking good.

We started the camera, and I don’t know if you dear reader have ever done anything on film, well it feels about the same as doing it off camera, but everything slightly changes. The slight change this time was that linden sort of dived rather than flopped backwards, I didn’t quite have enough of a grip on his legs, and his inertia lifted me off my feet and onto his, well his whole self really. After about 40 seconds he was able to speak, and was able, though reluctant, to move all his limbs. Urk.

We spent a short while working out what to tell the ppl in casualty.

The final shot is fantastic. We had to put in another shot to fix the continuity, but you see
(1) his face
(2) my face & his feet
(3) my face looking a little worried
(4) my feet

That shot will make the film famous, I’m sure of it.

Plus we get jackie-chan style footage for the end, of linden sprawled out in obvious real pain.

Here’s to Linden, a man who knows what it is to suffer for your art :-)

Palm Revisited

Well, I think the honeymoon with my palm is now over. And I’m glad to say we’re still in love. As a mark of my devotion I’ve bought some rechargeable batteries for it. I’ve said to a few people that it has revolutionised my life and that sounds like so much hyperbole but it has brought a positive effect to every day since I bought it. The story goes something like this.

I am one of the most hopelessly disorganised people I know. I need to make a concerted effort to hold a plan in my head and still rarely succeed. When I was going out with/engaged to the lovely Jenny one of the most important things she brought to the party was structure. She was always able to point out a better thing to be spending my time on and had the patience and/or obstinacy to make me do it :-)

Anyhow. In the last year, the biggest cause of stress to me has been constantly having to try to work out wtf I should be doing now/next as I would always feel that if I began one thing I would be forgetting another - and I would usually be right. Friends will be familiar with the mantra ”I have to go home and sort my life out” which was my stock reason for not doing more sociable things all year. The truth of it was I was so hopelessly ineffectual at sorting out said life that the job did still need doing every day, week in week out.

This is where this fantastic little device comes in. You can write on it just like paper (almost), but unlike paper it will go BING at you when you have to be somewhere. Fantastic!

I haven’t always done as it has told me and I have still missed a few appointments and made a couple of administrative cock-ups, but there really has been an immeasurable improvement in the levels of getting-stuff-done-ness in my life!

Swallow Tennis, Anyone?

Just walked across the church green to the village for lunch, and got buzzed by these wee birdies. There were about 3 - 5 of them in the field, constantly on the move 1-2 feet from the ground. A couple of times they would single me out and do a complete circle before scooting off. I stood still and turned slowly to check one out as it orbited me. It seemed to spot this, and at the end of its lap it turned inwards and then executed a tight u-turn, flashing its belly at me in some sort of display before hurtling away again. I can only assume the little tyke is defending some sort of territory or a nest site. I think a badminton racquet would be about the right weight and balance…

Visual redesign! Let me know if it sucks in any way!